April's Brain Journal

...huh, that's weird! i haven't had Crushing Pre-Shift anxiety at all today, right up until i thought about it a minute ago and it came back. i'll have to think about the possible factors here later, thankfully i only have about a minute left to go before i start my shift so i won't have to put up with it for long.

 

i wish it was easier to record what my voice/words/etc are doing a a given time. sometimes they work alright and sometimes they trip and derail and come out in the wrong order, as halting, stammering word salad that relies a lot on echolalia and scripts and short phrases with minimal context to make any sense at all. and pronouncing words properly gets really, really difficult, and if it's happening it's probably going to be happening for the rest of the day and maybe longer.

the weird part is i think it happens a lot more when i'm around people/environments i'm relaxed with? i can mostly communicate and express myself pretty clearly at work, do wordplay and make jokes and do anecdotes, but then i hang out with friends or my sister or rowan irl and then poof! words do not work again, mouth in general kind of stops working and i find myself lisping and squashing my voice and trying to talk around spit without registering that swallowing needs to happen and when

it doesn't seem to get worse with anxiety, either, although i do get some low-key anxiety from it sometimes; noticing flubs makes more and worse ones appear in short order, but i think that's a buffering glitch and not an anxiety thing so much

if anyone has advice or input i'd be interested in hearing it, but i guess mostly just leaving this here for myself: something's fucky with the way i talk, and it's really really bizarre to hear it when people tell me 'no, really, your voice doesn't sound weird at all,' bc. idk man talking or eating with my mouthbits feels like QWOPing 90% of the time, and the other 10% is when i'm at work

 

on the one hand, it's 2:30am and i would kind of like to go to sleep instead of inevitably staying up until 4am writing meta about angor rot, strickrot, and how the ways different trollhunters villains Posture reveal very different things about their characters, and that is probably the better choice

on the other hand, i really like these particular threads of thought and want to follow them, and i'm worried they'll evaporate during the back-to-back retail hellfuck that is going to be the next two days 8C

fuck it though, honestly, i can scribble notes on the train and on breaks a whole lot easier than i can make up for lost sleep

 

checking kintsugi anytime in the last month like

 

also, an interesting thing i finally more or less put my finger on while rewatching trollhunters with rowan last night: i have a tendency to zoom in on little details that stick out to me, and extrapolating to myself on the many possible interpretations of what they might mean, to the exclusion of things like 'basic comprehension of what the characters are saying to each other if it's not directly related to that?'

i am not braining very well, but basically it gave me a lot of food for thought about both my attention issues and how i interact with media+life in general. hmmm. i'm going to absorb some water and caffeine and then think about this some more.

 

also kintsugi autocorrect is awe-inspiring, why do you keep tacking entire new words onto words that end in 'e'

 

it's also really bizarre to me how Very Spergy i was as a kid/teenager compared to now. i dunno what changed so drastically that hearing people talk about spergy behavioral stuff often makes me think 'oh! i remember what that was like!' but Man is it disorienting

i remember, as a kid, doing things like daydreaming a story involving, as a set piece, a Magic Wall that Updates Itself with Pictures of Things that Happen, and then promptly getting sidetracked for like an hour trying to figure out exactly how fast it would update, whether it would allow almost-but-not-quite-duplicate frames, what it would do when it ran out of room because You Can't Just Delete Information, Janice,

(and then getting pulled right back into Thinking About It Intently every time it popped back into my head)

or being Very Well Known among my family, friends, and church for being completely transfixed by bouncing a basketball back and forth down the sidewalk for hours at a time (fuck now i'm craving it again it was so good)

or reading 400-page-books within about three hours, give or take, or seemingly magically intuiting random details of things people were talking about around me that i Shouldn't Have Known while understanding fuckall of anything else they were saying, or reading through the dictionary for fun, or playing RPGs in such a way that 95% of my hundred-hour playtime consisted of grinding as efficiently as possible on the same map so i could project exactly when and how my units would level up, or not wanting to talk about anything but neopets for six or seven straight years, give or take

and it's really really strange to me because i feel like i?????? don't really do Spergy Things much anymore? at least not to that extent? i slip into and understand allistic behavior pretty easily these days, in a work environment at least, and it's incredibly strange. i keep having 'OH I GET WHAT THIS ALLISTIC BEHAVIOR/EXPERIENCE IS ALL ABOUT NOW, OHHHHH' moments and it is Fucking Weird as Balls.

if anyone has anything to weigh in on this i'd be interested to hear it, it's an interesting subject for me.

 

Should I Polish Up and Post This Meta, or Rewatch All the Relevant Materials So I Don't Make Dumbfuck Mistakes (While Risking Losing All Motivation and Spoons in the Process): a biography

 

well you can always send it to me, and i'll go over it and check for mistakes!

 

good point! i guess mainly what i'm worried about missing Things That Would Be Important To/Clash With the Meta, that aren't necessarily factual mistakes but just things i wouldn't have thought about if i hadn't been watching it. hmmm.

clearly it's time for the part of metaing where i just make a list of all the scenes a particular character appears in at all :P

 

well that works! i have a good memory for detail stuff so if you want someone to go over a post and point out if a thing is clashing, i'm pretty decent at it

 

yeah! that'd be cool, i might take you up on it at some point c:

 

things i need to catch next time i find myself tempted to do them: buy and drink coffee late at night

yes, the caffeine is nice for Doing Things. no, the terrible sleep and dehydration aren't worth it. decaf, april, dammit.

 

That is so me. I'll catch myself getting an energy drink at 11pm on a work night and I'm like LOOK AT MY STUPID CHOICES

 

#R E L A T A B L E

i think what's more hilarious when it gets me, if fucking annoying, is that i often take like 50 years to finish a caffeine/comfort drink, so i'll find myself chugging the last of a cup of coffee i started at 8pm.... and realize too late that it is now 11pm and you just chugged coffee because it tasted nice, dumbass, congrats

 

I grew up poor so I have that DON'T WASTE thing ingrained hard, so I have trouble not finishing it even if I know it's a bad idea

 

oh geez, i feel it

Spoiler: history and brainstuff

my family was pretty poor for a good part of my growing up too, so i honestly am not quite sure how i got 'near-compulsive wastefulness' as a brainbug rather than the opposite, but i am definitely the kind of person to eat food i've left lying out too long and couldn't make myself put away just because YOU WENT TO THE TROUBLE TO GET/PREPARE THAT/YOU SHOULDN'T BE WASTING MONEY GET YOURSELF UNDER CONTROL. lifelong executive dysfunction issues have left me with a bit of a food-hoarding problem, i guess.

 

things i just realized, and feel dumb about: i did not actually have 'carlin' listed in my signature before a couple days ago, whoops. it's fixed now, but i take back 'nobody used carlin even though it's right there in my signature,' because poor memory strikes again and i feel like that's important to acknowledge. sorry about that!

 

on break so not much time rn, but note to self: expand on thoughts about 'chugging along' brain days vs 'noticing little things' days

(the latter appear to be days where i'm better at things like writing, meta, socializing, shitposting, and using my words in general)

 

Spoiler: nsfw, strickjim-ish

WELP GUESS WHO'LL BE IN HIS BUNK UNTIL S2 COMES OUT IN DECEMBER